1. Field
The system is in the technical field of video transcoding. More particularly, the present system is in the technical field of video transcoding in a distributed network.
2. Background
There is a large library of video and other media available on the internet today. In addition, more media is being added on a daily basis. Much of the media is stored as Flash or other file formats and stored on Web servers for use by web plug-ins on sites such as YouTube, Break.com, MetaCafe.com, and MySpace Video. These same sites are generating thousands of new files of media content daily. The ability to watch and share media on the internet has become a popular habit and users expect to continue to be able to view media content on their computers and other web-enabled devices, as well as on traditional televisions.
The migration from an analog to a digital television infrastructure has improved picture quality, but very little has been done to improve the variety and availability of digital content that can be delivered over this new infrastructure. Viewers have access to more content, but typically it's more of the same content delivered in much the same fashion as has been available in the past.
Consumers of content are more and more eschewing the choices available on television and choosing to experience the greater variety and instant access of content provided in the digital world of the internet and browser enabled devices. Many consumers have shut down their television viewing and obtain all content via web enabled devices.
A disadvantage of television is that nearly all traditional television content is available legally (via viewing sites such as hulu.com, youtube.com, metacafe.com, etc.) or illegally (via torrent streams, pirate content web sites, and unregulated peer to peer sharing). By contrast, web content is not easily viewable on television.
One problem in providing new content for use in television is the requirement for transcoding the content from a native format to a format that is suitable for viewing at a destination device. “Transcoding” refers to the conversion of one codec to another. In the video context, there are a number of codecs used for playback of digital video data. Often a video player does not support all types of codecs. If a user would like to playback a video source in an incompatible codec, the data source must be transcoded to a compatible codec.
Conventional transcoding systems and products do not account for the distributed geographical nature of high quality content. High quality content requires large file sizes. In some cases, these large files are located in distributed geographical locations. There are issues that arise from ingesting content from those locations and then distributing the content to various locations around the world. For example, due to the large file size of the high quality content in many instances the content is shipped via physical media (tape, digital storage) to a destination location where it can then be transcoded. This results in a manual and labor intensive process. This system discourages or even prevents the distribution and use of higher quality video sources as source material. This limits the data sources which can be transformed in many ways specific to the end user devices.